“Let me explain why Swedenborg merits scrutiny. It is a fact that the greatest poets and prose writers have borrowed liberally from him. The list is long: first Blake, as his direct spiritual descendant; then Goethe, a fervent reader of Swedenborg (as was Kant followed by Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, Balzac, Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Emerson, Dostoevsky….” – Czeslaw Milosz, 1980 Nobel Prize, Literature

Lithuanian-born, but educated in Poland, Milosz wrote in Polish. A poet, novelist, essayist, translator, critic and scholar, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. Milosz has acknowledged Swedenborg as one of his main sources of inspiration, along with Blake, Dostoevsky, Simone Weil and his own distant cousin, Oscar V de L Milosz (a French poet of Lithuanian origin who was a student of Swedenborg).

References: C Milosz, Emperor of the Earth (1977), (contains the essay ‘Swedenborg and Dostoevsky), Modes of Eccentric Vision, The Rising of the Sun, and Unattainable Earth.